This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as NeoVictorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered.
By Linda L. Reesman
November 22, 2024
The emergence of social change in the daily lives of English society appeared most noticeably through the Romantic-era response of human emotions to a period of reason that has defined the era of Enlightenment, scientifically and philosophically. Remarkably, the dramatic political shift that ...
Edited
By Isobel Sigley, Whitney Standlee
November 11, 2024
George Egerton: Terra Incognitas is the first published work to focus solely on Egerton and her literary legacy. It covers the range and extent of Egerton's life and literary career from her emergence into the milieu of London publishing in 1893 to her dramatic works (both original and in ...
By Francesca Arnavas
May 31, 2024
There are fairy tales that surprise, destabilise, or even shock us: these are uncanny fairy tales that manipulate familiar stories in creative and bewildering ways in order to express new meanings. This work analyses these tales, basing its approach on a reformulation of Freud’s concept of the ...
By Sarah Parker
February 29, 2024
While W. B. Yeats’s influential account of the ‘Tragic Generation’ claims that most fin-de-siècle poets died, or at least stopped writing, shortly after 1900, this book explodes this narrative by attending to the twentieth-century poetry produced by women poets Alice Meynell, Michael Field (...
By Michael Kramp
February 26, 2024
Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience explores the disturbing sustainability of White male supremacy. Kramp traces an imaginative failure and an imaginative success; his focus on British speculative fiction published between 1870 and 1900 demonstrates how even this elastic and wildly inventive literary ...
Edited
By Diana Maltz
January 29, 2024
In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and violent A Child of the Jago, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle to survive among London’s poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which the Jago was based, he ...
Edited
By Louise Kane
January 29, 2024
The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion, gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into Victorian ...
By Nadine Böhm-Schnitker
November 16, 2023
Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations establishes a new analytical method in the broader context of sensory studies in order to explain how the genre of the novel can impact on our perception of ourselves and our social contexts. Taking cultural literary studies ahead,...
By Elizabeth King
November 14, 2023
Why do writers so often write about writers? This book offers the first comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the fictional novelist as a character in literature, arguing that our notions of literary genius – and what it means to be an author – are implicitly shaped by and explicitly ...
By Anna Kay
September 25, 2023
Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England seeks to provide a comprehensive examination of the notorious Mannings' ‘Bermondsey murder’, and its wider implications in Victorian criminal narrative and popular culture. Exploring the ongoing textual afterlife of Maria Manning, including significant...
By Rebecca Styler
July 10, 2023
This book is the study of a religious metaphor: the idea of God as a mother, in British and US literature 1850–1915. It uncovers a tradition of writers for whom divine motherhood embodied ideals felt to be missing from the orthodox masculine deity. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George ...
By Tristan Donal Burke
May 31, 2023
Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth-Century Realism offers a fresh analysis of the nineteenth-century European novel, exploring the cultural images of Byron and Napoleon as they appear in the construction of ‘bourgeois heroism.’ Utilising a unique pan-European perspective, this volume draws ...